My daily readings 12/23/2012

Even with such a limited set of features, the page was weighing in at 250KB. I dug into the code and realized that our optimization tools (i.e. Closure compilation) were unable to exclude code that was never actually used in the page itself (which would be an unfair expectation of any tool under the circumstances). The only way to reduce the code further was to optimize by hand the CSS, Javascript, and image sprites myself. After three painstaking days, I had arrived at a much leaner solution. It still was not under 100KB though. Having just finished writing the HTML5 video player, I decided to plug it in instead of the far heavier Flash player. Bam! 98KB and only 14 requests. I threaded the code with some basic monitoring and launched an opt-in to a fraction of our traffic.